Massive downtown mural resurfaces from beneath ads that covered it for years

It’s an eight-story image of sea life — humpback whales, to be specific — painted on the back of a Dallas parking garage. In 1999, the artist donated it to the city. So why has it been gone for so long?

After recent advertising posters came down, a mural painted in 1999 by the artist and conservationist Wyland is visible on Tuesday, April 21, 2020 in downtown Dallas. The mural is part of a series of more than 100 he did around the world called "Whaling Walls."(Lynda M. Gonzalez / Staff Photographer)

Wyland was sitting at his home in the Florida Keys on a recent morning when he got the news. Given that he’s in quarantine, like everyone else in the world, the last thing he figured on getting was a breaking-news blast out of Dallas. A welcome news blast.

Now 63, Wyland is an artist and conservationist who got permission from a court to use only his last name. In 1999, he came to Dallas to paint a giant mural on the back of a downtown building. His creation — 164 feet long and eight stories high — depicts six life-size humpback whales swimming near a coral reef.

It covers the entire southwestern facade of the building at 505 N. Akard St., fronting a surface parking lot along North Field Street that, for the time being, sits mostly empty. A smaller portion of the mural also wraps around the San Jacinto Street side of the building, a parking garage with vacant commercial spaces at its street level.

After recent advertising posters came down, a mural painted in 1999 by the artist and conservationist Wyland is visible on Tuesday, April 21, 2020 in downtown Dallas. The mural is part of a series of 101 he did around the world called "Whaling Walls."(Lynda M. Gonzalez / Staff Photographer)

Wyland says no one paid a penny for it — through his foundation, he donated his time and money as a charitable gift to the people of Dallas. Plano-based J.C. Penney chipped in too, donating everything from buckets of paint to lodging for Wyland and his team. The finished product became Whaling Wall 82, one of 101 Whaling Walls he created all over the world between 1981 and 2019.

“I remember it well,” he says about the day of its unveiling in 1999, when former Dallas Cowboys player Herschel Walker showed up to do the ribbon-cutting. “We had so many people. It was just tremendous. There was nothing like it. It was the biggest piece of public art in the city.”

Sounds like a good-news story in every way, until the humpback whales Wyland painted became as endangered as the massive marine mammals memorialized by the mural once were. We don’t know the exact date, but out of nowhere one day, Wyland’s creation disappeared. Poof, it was gone, covered up by outdoor advertising, which remained in place until just this month. Wyland estimates that ads began to conceal his creation “about five years ago, and when I heard about it, it made me sick."

So, the last thing he expected was a happy ending.

“Here’s what happened,” he says from his oceanic home. “The coronavirus got to it. This may be one of the only good things that came out of this coronavirus is that it’s dried up outdoor advertising.”

He appears to be right.

Wyland starts his giant mural of whales on the southwest side of 505 N. Akard St. in downtown Dallas Wednesday afternoon April 7, 1999.(NGUYEN, Huy / 127284)

The company that handles signage for the location of Wyland’s piece is San Antonio-based Clear Channel Outdoor. Since the onset of the coronavirus crisis last month, Clear Channel has been reeling. Despite a 52-week high of $5.47 a share, the company reports a 52-week low of 36 cents a share.

Asked about the mural and the ads that conceal it, company spokesman Jason D. King responded with a statement on April 15 that said: “Clear Channel Outdoor manages advertising sales for the wallscape and creative is posted and removed as one campaign ends and another is set to begin.”

Veletta Lill, who began serving on the Dallas City Council two years before Wyland painted the mural and stayed put until 2005, recalls how it got there — and how the advent of downtown advertising made it vanish.

After recent advertising posters came down, a mural painted in 1999 by the artist and conservationist Wyland is visible on Tuesday, April 21, 2020 in downtown Dallas. The mural is part of a series of 101 he did around the world called "Whaling Walls."(Lynda M. Gonzalez / Staff Photographer)

The mural appeared, she says, “prior to the time that large-scale advertising was permitted” downtown and coincided with a movement of similar art in other downtown locations. At that time, the only large-scale murals being painted downtown, she says, “were of an artistic nature.”

And then came large-scale ads. But before that, she says, Wyland’s piece was completed and so was The Storm. It, too, appears on the side of a parking garage, adjacent to the Dallas Arts District. The Storm was painted by two students at the Booker T. Washington High School for the Performing and Visual Arts and was completed, she says, “right around the same time that Wyland completed his.”

As for approval, both got it, she says, from the planning department and the Downtown Improvement District — or what was then called the Central Dallas Association — as well as the public art wing of the city agency now known as the Office of Arts and Culture.

“The Storm and Wyland’s piece and the little boy pulling the wagon” — that one has since been removed — “were all done right around the same time,” Lill says.

The city approved large-scale signage in two phases, and yes, she says, one of those was around five years ago, when Wyland’s whales were covered up by advertising.

Part of the international "Whaling Wall" series, painted in Dallas by Wyland the artist, on a building on North Akard St.(NGUYEN, Huy / 127284)

Mike Rawlings, who served as mayor of Dallas from 2011 to 2019, remembers the issue of downtown advertising coming up during council meetings.

“We authorized advertising downtown early on in my tenure,” says Rawlings, who noted that such advertising “has to be zoned for it. It was an item that came before the City Council. It goes through the Zoning Commission. There was some debate, and yet, it passed. If it was done in a style in which Apple and those folks did their advertising, I thought it made downtown look good.”

Looking back, however, Rawlings doesn’t remember anyone voicing opposition to covering up the whales. Had they, things might have turned out differently. “I do remember the whales, ’cause I’ve been around a while,” the ex-mayor says, "and I always thought they were beautiful.”

And they are, although the now-uncovered mural reveals swirls of spray-painted graffiti that mar its base and underscore how Dallas has been less than kind to Wyland’s gift.

Lill echos Rawlings’ sentiment about Whaling Wall 82, saying, “I feel that you need noncommercial pieces in your downtown. So much of what we have that’s of super scale downtown is advertising. It’s commercial. This is beyond commercial. It speaks to our humanity. And I feel strongly that it’s important to have that downtown as well.”

In this 1999 file photo, volunteers keep the paint pumping for Wyland the artist as he works on his whale mural that graces 505 N. Akard St.(NGUYEN, Huy / 127284)

Unfortunately, Wyland says, Dallas isn’t the only place where this is happening — the concealment of public art by those who seize a typically prime location as a platform for large-scale, L.A.-like advertising. They don’t deface the art — they plaster over it — and get away with it by using what Wyland derisively brands “legal hocus-pocus.”

"Instead of destroying the wall — because they know they’d be liable if they did that — they cover it up,” he says.

And while that may be legal, or at least not illegal, Wyland says it’s a risky strategy on their part, because of what what he calls “a powerful federal law that protects public art.” It’s the 1990 Visual Artists Rights Act, which grants artists certain rights over their work, regardless of who actually owns it.

Twelve years earlier in Los Angeles, Kent Twitchell’s Ed Ruscha mural was painted over without his approval. Twitchell agreed to the largest settlement ever under VARA for $1.1 million against the U.S. government and 12 defendants.

But those high-profile examples involve artwork that was damaged or destroyed. Wyland’s work remains intact, even though it’s long been invisible.

And so the cover-ups continue to happen.

Another "Whaling Wall" at the South Padre Island convention center was created in 1994 by Wyland.(Mary Ellen Botter / Digital File_EMAIL)

“They,” he says, meaning the landlords and advertising companies, not just in Dallas but in other cities around the country, “put their little heads together and figure out how they can somehow put up their ad, even if it manages to eliminate a gift — a gift to the community, to Dallas, from my foundation. Clearly, in this case, the landlord and the sign company wanted to make money, and yes, it really does destroy public art. If they can get away with it, well, they can cover any piece of public art.”

We made attempts to contact State Street Bank & Trust Co. of Connecticut, the owner of 505 N. Akard St., but have yet to hear back.

Wyland has fought this battle before. He engaged in a prolonged fight with General Motors and later Reebok and Nike over a similar issue in Detroit, where a massive Whaling Wall mural on the side of Broderick Tower, overlooking the Detroit Tigers’ Comerica Park, has survived numerous nasty battles.

“We won every time,” Wyland says, “meaning me and the community.”

But the point is, the fight had to be waged over and over until Wyland and the lovers of his art got the outcome they wanted. He compares it to an election that, for some irrational reason, has to be voted on multiple times.

In the artist’s view, the past is past, but going forward, he hopes the people of Dallas get involved, as they did in Detroit, to protect the city’s only population of humpback whales.

“If you have public art that you love, speak up! Don’t allow this to happen,” he says. “In Dallas or anywhere else, because it sets a precedent.”

After recent advertising posters came down, a mural painted in 1999 by the artist and conservationist Wyland is visible on Tuesday, April 21, 2020 in downtown Dallas. The mural is part of a series of 101 he did around the world called "Whaling Walls."(Lynda M. Gonzalez / Staff Photographer)

Wyland says he’s so pumped about the mural’s reappearance that he wants to return to Dallas, “to touch it up, to put a protective clear coat on it. It doesn’t belong to me or the owner of the building, it belongs to the community. It was a beautiful gift. I had a real smile on my face when I heard about it this morning from my foundation director. This is such positive news.

“There aren’t whales in Dallas, but my whole concept with the project was to connect even landlocked cities to the ocean. We’re all connected to the sea, so if people see the beauty in nature, they’ll work to protect it and preserve it. These humpbacks I depicted in the coral reef, they’re all painted to scale, so you really get a sense of the ocean realm.”

Whether you live in Dallas or the Florida Keys, he says, the image calls to mind Herman Melville’s line from Moby Dick: “... we ourselves see in all rivers and oceans. It is the image of the ungraspable phantom of life; and this is the key to it all.”

“Tell me," he says, "how is it OK to cover up a landmark mural that was dedicated by Herschel Walker and me to the people of Dallas? Why would anybody think that’s OK? My hope is that the people of Dallas will help me protect this mural and others like it around the country.”

This photo was taken at the official dedication of Wyland's giant mural of humpback whales in downtown Dallas in 1999.(Gary Firstenberg / Wyland Foundation)

Michael Granberry, Arts Writer. Michael Granberry was born and grew up in Dallas. He graduated from Samuell High School in Pleasant Grove in 1970 and from Southern Methodist University in 1974. Between his junior and senior years, he interned at The Washington Post during "the Watergate summer" of 1973. He spent 19 years at the Los Angeles Times before returning to Dallas.